


whole

by Askance



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Body Image, F/M, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-15
Updated: 2013-09-15
Packaged: 2017-12-26 17:05:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/968398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam has only one rule, really, when it comes to sex. Lights off.</p>
            </blockquote>





	whole

Sam has only one rule, really, when it comes to sex. Lights off.

In his recent history of one night stands, the rare relationship that manages to last him and his tumultuous life for a few months or so, he’s been open to pretty much anything—as long as they get theirs, he’s happy to oblige whatever they want to try, men and women both—the odd pair of handcuffs, maybe, an intriguing position, things they like, things they hope _he’ll_ like. He only asks one thing in return: the lamps stay off; the curtains stay drawn.

Most of the time it’s not a problem. Most of the time when he slips away with the bartender at the end of a long weekend hunting with Dean, leaving a note on a cocktail napkin in his brother’s pocket as to where he’ll be, they get back to whatever room or apartment or house the fling guides him to and their hands never even venture near the light switches. Most of the time half the fun is figuring one another out in blackness, seeking out soft skin from under clothes without the aid of sight, learning the shape of breasts or a cock with touch only—not with eyes.

And most of the time the reason for Sam’s rule never becomes a problem. By the time the sun rises on the morning after, whether on a room he’s never seen before or a bed he knows well, he’s dressed, he’s hidden, he’s safe. He has opportunity, before light comes, to close himself up like a mausoleum, all cobwebs and corpses shut away.

That’s most of the time. But Sandra is that one-in-twenty exception.

She’s gorgeous, Sandra. She’s got black hair that frames her round face like perfectly-molded ironwork, sleek and sweet, and she’s got eyes the colour of boysenberries, rich and near-purple, and maybe it’s the drink she bought him hazing his vision, but they seem like the most important things in the whole bar. She’s older—maybe ten, twelve years—but she hardly looks it—her face is smooth, her skin the colour of rich cherry wood, and he knows, almost as soon as she comes up to him at his lonely stool in this middle-of-nowhere roadhouse, that he’s going to go home with her, and she knows it, too.

Dean’s back at the motel, nursing a busted knee, probably snoring-asleep with the effects of the Tylenol PM Sam grabbed for him at the gas station, so Sam is here, drinking alone—well, alone at least until Sandra appears, like a shadow pulling away from the wall, with a bright white smile and her berry-coloured eyes.

“Drinking alone, honey?” she says, by way of greeting, as she pushes a wet bottle across the bar to him, leaving a streak of condensation in its wake. “Now why’s that?”

He smiles sheepishly, a little bowed under the weight of her glow.

“Usual drinking partner’s out of commission. I’m Sam.”

“Sandra.” They shake hands; her grip is strong and solid, and then she leans her elbow on the bar, tossing her hair a little out of her face.

Maybe it’s just his propensity for getting lost in a person, but whatever small talk they make is a fog somewhere at the back of his head—he can’t stop _looking_ at her, and absorbing bits and pieces of what she says like snowflakes melting on his tongue: she’s single, she’s a paralegal, she’s tired of stuffy dinner parties with her stuffy firm, she needed a change of pace. God, she says, what she wouldn’t give for the opportunity to come out to places like these more often, drink a good pilsner in her favourite jeans, instead of stomaching migraine-inducing champagne cramped into an LBD every other Friday—maybe meet someone not so interested in the opera and more interested in the Top 40. She touches his shoulder briefly; she grins.

When she asks what he does for work he lies, and fights back the pang of guilt that comes with it. _Mechanic_ is the usual answer, and he softens it with, “But I’m between jobs right now.” She clicks her tongue sympathetically and calls for another drink.

“I know how that is,” she says. “Mechanic, though, huh? Respectable. Bet you help out a lot of people.”

“I’d like to think so,” he replies, and knows she won’t understand what he really means.

He can tell just by looking at the soft place where her chin meets her neck and by hearing her talk about the jumped-up assholes on the fifth floor that she’s a good woman. She smells like menthol and primrose when she leans close to him and the smell goes straight to his chest, blooms warm in it. When she asks, with a ticked-up eyebrow and a smile, “I don’t suppose you’d want to get out of here?” he’s got the _sure_ already poised on his tongue. He wants, very quietly, to talk to her and to kiss her, even if only for a little while, so he drains his drink and slides off the stool to follow her through the dusky smoke and neon of the bar and out into the cold rainy dark.

Halfway to her place, twenty minutes away by two-lane highway and then by residential streets, past tall black hedges and realtors’ signs, he starts thinking—beneath the bass beat of her Top 40 radio and the percussion of her fingers on the wheel—about the lights. In his mind he starts up the ritual mantra of _please leave them off_ and it takes on the rhythm of the music all the way to her wet concrete drive, her tall and well-appointed house, her soft pretty silhouette in the driver’s seat.

* * *

 

To Sam’s dismay, when Sandra has locked her tiny dog in a side room and is down to her bra and jeans in the entrance to her bedroom, her hand reaches out for the light switch and the yellow glow fills the place, and she pulls back from laughing in his shoulder to see his face gone a little pale.

She pushes a hair out of her eyes. “I like it better with the lights on,” she says by way of explanation, hands returning to his waist, pulling him towards her.

He pauses, trying to keep from looking pained. “I’d—I’d really rather we didn’t. If that’s okay.”

“Why? You got something to hide?” she says, teasingly, and abruptly pulls away to kick off her heels into the corner where they clatter against the baseboard.

Sam bites his lip, fidgets, pulls his shoulders in. He doesn’t come inside. “Um.”

Sandra finally seems to get that he’s serious, and stops. She turns back to him, resting her hand gently in the soft angle of her hip, and peers into his downturned face with her boysenberry eyes.

“What’s the matter?” she says, without any anger or disappointment—only concern.

He knows how stupid it must sound—the presence of light as a dealbreaker for what would otherwise be, he’s certain, impeccable sex—but even the faint hum of the light-bulb in the lamp on her nightstand is making him uneasy, and the ghosts of her hands against the thin cotton of his T-shirt are becoming more pronounced.

Sandra comes back to him, taps a finger against his cheek once. “Seriously, Sam, what is it? You okay?”

He shrugs, averting his eyes. “I just—prefer the dark, that’s all. It’s—it’s kind of my one rule, you know?”

“Why’s that?”

Sam gnaws on his lip, unsure how to explain, what to say, how to say it without sounding like an idiot. “I’m uncomfortable in the light,” he says, finally, sounding more like a guilty third-grader than a grown man.

Sandra looks at him quizzically, and he knows she still doesn’t get it.

“I can—I mean, if you really want them on, that’s fine, but I, um—I’m just—I just really can’t do that,” he says, feeble. He can feel his face getting hot with shame. “I can—I can leave.” He doesn’t _want_ to leave; she’s beautiful, and he wants her, and she wants him, but there’s just something so inexcusable, he feels, in breaking his one and only rule.

“Oh, honey—honestly—it’s not that big of a deal,” she says, sounding half-bemused, half-concerned, and she reaches for his wrist to pull him gently into the room. “We can keep them off. It’s really that big of a thing for you?”

“Sorry,” he says, managing an apologetic smile, and Sandra clicks her tongue and makes a sound in her throat and reaches up to kiss him, moving them both backwards towards the lamp on her nightstand and the high-piled pillows on her bed. She pushes him down onto its edge and he reaches out for the lamp to turn it off, but before he can, her soft hands are under his shirt and pushing it up, exposing his stomach and chest to the light, and he says, “Wait—” but she’s already seen.

“Jesus,” she says, hastily pulling her hands away, standing up straight. All the smile is gone out of her boysenberry eyes.

His shirt falls back down and he feels the warm mint-and-primrose feeling in his chest giving way to cold and disappointment, looking at her wide open face, her body pushed back on its hinges away from him.

Sam looks down at the white carpet between his bare feet, shoulders flat.

“Yeah,” he says, softly.

Sandra stands there for a minute, chewing on her lip, and Sam doesn’t say anything. _Dammit,_ he thinks. He should have been quicker to turn off the lamp. He should have insisted she do it herself, or that they stay downstairs in the cool dark living room, or something. _This is what happens when you let your rules get broken, idiot. You may as well just leave and spare her the trouble of asking you to._

He blinks hard, pinching back tears, and starts to stand, but she acts with catlike reflexes and puts a hand on his shoulder. “Wait a minute.”

“It’s okay, I know, it’s—it’s not pretty,” he says, clearing his throat hard. He can’t look at her. “If you want me to, um—go—I know you were expecting something easier on the eyes—”

Sandra laughs, and that’s what surprises him.

She’s looking at him like he’s lost his mind when he lifts his face to her, an incredulous twist on her lovely mouth.

“Are you kidding me?” she says.

Sam blinks, the wetness in his eyes disappearing, confusion rising to take the place of the blush on his face. “What?”

“You think I’m gonna kick you _out_ just because—because you’re a little scratched-up?”

Sam thinks, _well, I would._

Sandra, this time with determination, leans down and takes hold of the hem of his shirt again, and—unsure what to do besides let her, as the damage is already done—Sam lifts his arms for her, lets her pull it up over his head, and he keeps his eyes on the soft roll of her skin beneath her bra while she takes his naked chest in.

It’s _ugly._ He knows it is. He’s had to stare at it in the mirror every day of his life. Any and all angelic healings and bouts of good luck aside, his body is a mass of scars—pockmarked bullet holes, jagged lines of silvery raised skin, a series of three small scratches like the claws of a cat across his right nipple, even, one of which has half-destroyed it, and it’s healed warped and asymmetrical. Stretched, broken, uneven flesh in strings and slashes and irregular circles, interrupted only by the shadow of his belly-button and the dark ink of his tattoo, like a canvas someone’s taken a knife to.

Lights off; that’s his only rule. Because there’s a difference between touching scars and blemishes under the safety of darkness and _seeing_ them. They’re frightening—mechanics don’t have bodies like that—they speak to what he really does, the danger of him, and half of him likes the dark so that the men and women he meets won’t have to see that scary, dangerous part, and the other half of him _needs_ the dark so that he, too, can pretend he doesn’t know it’s there.

Sandra’s still looking at him, and he’s a little surprised about that. Most people would at least avert their eyes a little from something so uncomely. She expected a decent-looking guy and she got Frankenstein’s monster. He wishes she’d say something.

“Christ,” is what she eventually says, quietly and neutrally. He swallows hard.

She doesn’t so much say anything after that, though—more _does._ Because the next thing he knows she’s standing between his legs, still in her bra and jeans, and she’s got her hands on his shoulders and she’s pushing him gently down onto his back on her bed.

He tries to fumble words up to his lips, but none come, so he stares at her instead, trying to discern her intentions out of the blackness of her hair and the shadow on her cheek. He feels her hand, then—her fingertip, really—coming to rest on the end-point of a long line below his collarbone, and goes still.

She doesn’t ask, _what the hell happened to you?_ She doesn’t ask how he got it, where he got it. She doesn’t ask anything. She just traces its length, delicately, almost reverently, and Sam stares down at the movement of her hand and wonders why those tears he’d swallowed down are coming back up again.

“Honey,” she says—not tinged with sympathy, particularly, or pity—almost something like wonder, or confusion, or sorrow. Then she bends her head and kisses the scar and Sam closes his eyes, lashes wet.

In the simple darkness behind his lids he feels her move, from his collarbone to the concave of his belly, from the line of his hips to the bullet hole below his ribs, from nipple to sternum, her lips brushing over every single scar and every single mark, and he can’t feel anything of disgust in her touch, can’t feel anything in her except care and carefulness. From the short thick knife wound in his stomach to the straight-razor cuts parallel to his ribcage she almost seems to worship him a little, acknowledging each one with breath and kiss, and then leaving it behind, her hands gently at his sides, her hair falling like a curtain against his shivering skin, and by the time she’s done, by the time she’s catalogued every single one of the imperfections he’s tried so hard for so long to hide away from all comers, by the time she lifts her head to look at him, his eyes are open and searching the ceiling and his face is hot and wet with tears.

“What?” she says, softly. “You think you’re ugly or something?”

He can’t even nod; his chest feels too warm, and his throat too thick; no one has touched him in those places with so much care and kindness since Dean patched each one up in the first place. No one has seen him like this in the light in as many years as he’s been with anyone who _could_ see. He’s been so careful—so cautious—wearing the darkness of bedrooms and living rooms like bandages so that no one would have to look, no one would have to be disgusted by him—and year by year it’s only gotten more important, more imperative, to hide those things from the people who liked him enough to love him, because it isn’t just the scars—it’s what the scars imply; it’s all the other things that can’t be seen or touched that he hates about his body, the acid blood in his veins, the crimes and torments seared onto the fabric of his mind, how crippled and how broken he actually is in his heart and soul. He can hide all that in darkness, he can hide it from himself; but now Sandra, this stranger, is leaning over him, having counted them all, and she’s kissing the tears away from his face, now, and he doesn’t know what the hell to _do._

“Honey,” she says, holding his face in her hands and tilting it up to her, so he can’t help but look into her near-purple eyes, “you’re not ugly at all.”

He wants to say, _you don’t know me; if you knew me you wouldn’t say that._ But Sandra’s a good woman, and not one to be argued with. He can see that in her face, and hear that in her breath. So he has no choice, really, but to hold what she’s said in his mind while he helps her work off his jeans and his boxers, and she guides his hands to the button of her jeans, his fingers to the crease of her leg where it meets her hip, the black lace of her underwear. When she slips him inside her she fits her splayed hands over the splits in his skin as if they’re an imprint of her touch, and she kisses him while she moves on his cock, and he wraps his arms tight around her soft warm body, trying to say _thank you_ with every roll of her hips and push of his own.

Sam buries his face in her shoulder, and when he has the strength he sits up, holding her in his lap, and he kisses the curve of her neck again and again, grateful for the feeling of her breasts against his skin, the soft sounds she’s making in his ear, the shudder and trembling of her body when she comes before he does, and when—finally—they’re both spent and breathless and she’s lying against his sprawled-back body on the mattress, she laughs a little, and he laughs too, an arm around her shoulders. And the light is still on.

* * *

 

For once Sam doesn’t move to pull his clothes on before sunrise.

He lies in Sandra’s bed, listening to the first morning birds chattering in the grey dawn outside her window, and listens to her breathe where she’s spooned up behind him. They never did turn off the lamp at all. It’s been glowing, yellow and kind, all night, even while they slept.

Hesitantly, too awake now to go back to sleep against her, Sam reaches up and lays a hand flat on his chest, fingers spread. He drags it down, slowly, feeling all the bumps and ridges against his palm, and breathes long and deep. _Ugly,_ his mind whispers, in habit, but he grits his teeth and pushes that down. No. Maybe not beautiful—but not ugly, either. Not anymore.

Sandra uncurls a little at his back, sighing in her sleep, and she drapes an arm over his side, and he manages to smile. She’s gorgeous, Sandra. A very good woman. A little early sunlight is drawing in a thin white streak past the edge of the curtain and across his skin.

Tomorrow, in all reality—once he’s entered Sandra’s number safely into his phone and left her tall, well-appointed house behind in the rear-view mirror of the Impala, off to Arkansas or Oregon or wherever the next beast is waiting—tomorrow, he thinks, he’ll probably begin to hate the way he looks in the light again.

But maybe—just maybe—a little less than before.


End file.
